In the South-Mediterranean countries the demand of Higher Education often exceeds capacity in the existing HE system, and therefore the use and integration of Open Educational Resources (OER) and Open Educational Practices (OEP) are possible ways to facilitate learners’ access to the university, thus promoting equity and democratisation of Higher Education.

The OpenMed project, “Opening up education in South Mediterranean countries” aims at exploring the adoption of strategies and channels that embrace the principles of openness and reusability within the context of South-Mediterranean universities. The overarching goal of OpenMed is to raise awareness and facilitate the adoption of OER and OEP in the South-Mediterranean countries, with a particular focus on higher education in Egypt, Jordan, Morocco and Palestine. OpenMed is supported by the Erasmus+ programme of the European Union.

Based on the findings from the Compendium, we have designed the OpenMed Open Education (OE) Regional Agenda for the South Mediterranean Universities, an exercise to gather stakeholders’ opinions with the aim to define the strategic areas of action where universities in the South-Mediterranean should focus their open education offerings.

OpenMed also include a training of trainers components, which has been recently pre-announced. The training course targets primarily university teachers and secondarily university managers and ICT support staff, offering training opportunities to Higher Education staff with a focus on know-how and skills to use, reuse and remix OER and assist them with the start-up of open educational practices.

Supporting dialogue among stakeholders, and building capacity of educators, will ensure that the necessary infrastructure to enable OE is taken into account and adequately resourced, as part of the long term and strategic objectives of the partner institutions. Negotiation and development of such infrastructure would also increase the volume of virtual mobilities in Europe and in South Mediterranean countries, opening up new, flexible, learning pathways, and exposing students to international approaches and dialogues, with large-scale benefits in terms of social externalities and learner citizenship.